LexiCAL: A calculator for lexical variables.

While a number of tools have been developed for researchers to compute the lexical characteristics of words, extant resources are limited in their useability and functionality. Specifically, some tools require users to have some prior knowledge of some aspects of the applications, and not all tools allow users to specify their own corpora. Additionally, current tools are also limited in terms of the range of metrics that they can compute.

Consistency norms for 37,677 english words.

Consistency reflects the mapping between spelling and sound. That is, a word is feedforward consistent if its pronunciation matches that of similarly spelled words, and feedback consistent if its spelling matches that of similar pronounced words. For a quasi-regular language such as English, the study of consistency effects on lexical processing has been limited by the lack of readily accessible norms.

The Auditory English Lexicon Project: A multi-talker, multi-region psycholinguistic database of 10,170 spoken words and nonwords.

The Auditory English Lexicon Project (AELP) is a multi-talker, multi-region psycholinguistic database of 10,170 spoken words and 10,170 spoken nonwords. Six tokens of each stimulus were recorded as 44.1-kHz, 16-bit, mono WAV files by native speakers of American, British, and Singapore English, with one from each gender.

False recognition modality effects in short-term memory: Reversing the auditory advantage.

The auditory advantage in short-term false recognition - reduced false memories for auditory compared to visually presented words (Olszewska, Reuter-lorenz, Munier, & Bendler, 2015), has been attributed to greater item distinctiveness in auditory compared to visual memory traces. If so, varying auditory trace distinctiveness should influence false recognition rates. Phonologically and semantically related words were presented visually or aurally.

Cross-modal masked repetition and semantic priming in auditory lexical decision.

The underlying processes and mechanisms supporting the recognition of visually and auditorily presented words have received considerable attention in the literature. To a lesser extent, the interplay between visual and spoken lexical representations has also been investigated using cross-modal lexical processing paradigms, yielding evidence that auditorily presented words influence visual word recognition, and vice versa. The present study extends this work by examining and comparing the relative sizes of cross-modal repetition (cat-CAT) and semantic (dog-CAT) priming in auditory lexical decision, using heavily masked, briefly presented visual primes and a common set of auditory targets.

The role of semantic transparency in visual word recognition of compound words: A megastudy approach.

Previous studies on visual word recognition of compound words have provided evidence for the influence of lexical properties (e.g., length, frequency) and semantic transparency (the degree of relatedness in meaning between a compound word and its constituents) in morphological processing (e.

An item-level analysis of lexical-semantic effects in free recall and recognition memory using the megastudy approach.

Psycholinguists have developed a number of measures to tap different aspects of a word's semantic representation. The influence of these measures on lexical processing has collectively been described as semantic richness effects. However, the effects of these word properties on memory are currently not well understood.

How We Think about Temporal Words: A Gestural Priming Study in English and Chinese.

Spatial metaphors are used to represent and reason about time. Such metaphors are typically arranged along the sagittal axis in most languages. For example, in English, "The future lies ahead of us" and "We look back on our past.

Semantic Richness Effects in Spoken Word Recognition: A Lexical Decision and Semantic Categorization Megastudy.

A large number of studies have demonstrated that semantic richness dimensions [e.g., number of features, semantic neighborhood density, semantic diversity , concreteness, emotional valence] influence word recognition processes.

Recognition memory for foreign language lexical stress.

This study investigated whether English speakers retained the lexical stress patterns of newly learned Spanish words. Participants studied spoken Spanish words (e.g.

Articulation effects in melody recognition memory.

Various surface features-timbre, tempo, and pitch-influence melody recognition memory, but articulation format effects, if any, remain unknown. For the first time, these effects were examined. In Experiment 1, melodies that remained in the same, or appeared in a different but similar, articulation format from study to test were recognized better than were melodies that were presented in a distinct format at test.

Testing the myth of the encoding-retrieval match.

The view that successful memory performance depends importantly on the extent to which there is a match between the encoding and retrieval conditions is commonplace in memory research. However, Nairne (Memory, 10, 389-395, 2002) proposed that this idea about trace-cue compatibility being the driving force behind memory retention is a myth, because one cannot make unequivocal predictions about performance by appealing to the encoding-retrieval match. What matters instead is the relative diagnostic value of the match, and not the absolute match.

Observing neighborhood effects without neighbors.

With a new metric called phonological Levenshtein distance (PLD20), the present study explores the effects of phonological similarity and word frequency on spoken word recognition, using polysyllabic words that have neither phonological nor orthographic neighbors, as defined by neighborhood density (the N-metric). Inhibitory effects of PLD20 were observed for these lexical hermits: Close-PLD20 words were recognized more slowly than distant PLD20 words, indicating lexical competition. Importantly, these inhibitory effects were found only for low- (not high-) frequency words, in line with previous findings that phonetically related primes inhibit recognition of low-frequency words.

Distributional analyses in auditory lexical decision: neighborhood density and word-frequency effects.

In the present article, the effects of phonological neighborhood density and word frequency in spoken word recognition were examined using distributional analyses of response latencies in auditory lexical decision. A density x frequency interaction was observed in mean latencies; frequency effects were larger for low-density words than for high-density words. Distributional analyses further revealed that for low-density words, frequency effects were reflected in both distributional shifting and skewing, whereas for high-density words, frequency effects were purely mediated by distributional skewing.

The roles of semantic similarity and proactive interference in the word length effect.

We examined the influence of semantic similarity and proactive interference (PI) on the word length effect (WLE) in immediate serial recall. Word length was manipulated by comparing memory for monosyllabic versus multisyllabic words. PI effects were evaluated by manipulating semantic similarity in the to-be-remembered lists and examining its impact on the WLE's magnitude across eight-trial blocks.

Proactive interference and cuing effects in short-term cued recall: does foil context matter?

Tehan and Humphreys's (1995, 1996) short-term cued recall paradigm showed that recall in short-term memory is cue driven. In critical trials, the participants studied two blocks of four words each and were required to forget the first block while remembering the second block. A foil in the first block (e.

Talker variability and recognition memory: instance-specific and voice-specific effects.

The author investigated voice context effects in recognition memory for words spoken by multiple talkers by comparing performance when studied words were repeated with same, different, or new voices at test. Hits and false alarms increased when words were tested with studied voices compared with unstudied voices. Discrimination increased only when the exact same voice was used.

Effects of lexical competition on immediate memory span for spoken words.

Current theories and models of the structural organization of verbal short-term memory are primarily based on evidence obtained from manipulations of features inherent in the short-term traces of the presented stimuli, such as phonological similarity. In the present study, we investigated whether properties of the stimuli that are not inherent in the short-term traces of spoken words would affect performance in an immediate memory span task. We studied the lexical neighbourhood properties of the stimulus items, which are based on the structure and organization of words in the mental lexicon.

Multimodal perceptual organization of speech: Evidence from tone analogs of spoken utterances.

Theoretical and practical motives alike have prompted recent investigations of multimodal speech perception. Theoretically, multimodal studies have extended the conceptualization of perceptual organization beyond the familiar modality-bound accounts deriving from Gestalt psychology. Practically, such investigations have been driven by a need to understand the proficiency of multimodal speech perception using an electrocochlear prosthesis for hearing.